Article
Welcome to Ukrainian poetry - March 2005
January 18, 2006
So, should the next issue of the Ukrainian magazine on PIW be somehow ‘orange’, I was asking myself? And how orange could it be?
The so-called revolution quite naturally stimulated the oral poetic tradition. Kyiv’s streets were flooded with short verses, rhymed jokes, songs and slogans, which slowly migrated to walls and fences – thank God, we have plenty of those – as well as thousands of hand-made posters. But poetry managed to stay abreast of the revolution, if not be about it. Poets gave interviews, wrote open letters and articles to various media, but not poetry. The only ‘orange’ poem I have read so far was written in New York. I call it a victory. And a liberation of poet from the role of “national Messiah”, mentioned by {id="5528" title="Yuri Andrukhovych"} in the introduction to November issue of Ukrainian poetry.
Thus the March issue is not about oranges; it’s about poetry, as usual. For the first time it presents the work of two poets, not just one.
{id="5520" title="Halyna Krouk"} is 30, and about to publish her third book of poetry. She’s one of the younger but quite well-known Ukrainian poets loved by critics. She writes out of a “boundary condition” and her poetry is that of “a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown”, as Pedro Almodovar puts it.
{id="5517" title="Mykola Ryabchuk"}, a real guru for the subsequent generations of poets, wrote his last poem in 1988. Today he’s much better known as a political analyst and essayist, which leaves his brilliant poetry – under the Soviet regime he was expelled from the university for such writings – in unworthy obscurity.
Belonging to different generations they have a common sense of the word – they are very thrifty, sometimes even taciturn, but sharp and precise. There’s nowhere to hide – one can feel a strong author’s self behind each line.
This issue introduces a new feature – an {id="5517" title="interview with a poet"} (in this case Ryabchuk), conducted especially for PIW, and continues to publish translators’ notes on the poetry they worked on.
See you in May!
Much has changed since Mykola Ryabchuk, one of the two Ukrainian poets of the month, wrote his essay ‘Minor literature of a Major Country’, published in this issue of PIW. And the last four months has seen most of these changes. Ukraine’s Orange Revolution even delayed this Ukrainian issue for a month.
Mea culpa. Instead of working on translations and introductions, choosing poems and talking to poets, I was on Maidan – I’m sure, by now most of you will know what that means – together with the absolute majority of them. Putting aside the eternal opposition of ‘the arts and politics’ Ukrainian poets from all over the country came to Kyiv to be where they had to be. They stayed over at the houses of friends or friends of friends, slept on floors and ate in fast-food places to spend days and nights on the freezing central square of the country. So, should the next issue of the Ukrainian magazine on PIW be somehow ‘orange’, I was asking myself? And how orange could it be?
The so-called revolution quite naturally stimulated the oral poetic tradition. Kyiv’s streets were flooded with short verses, rhymed jokes, songs and slogans, which slowly migrated to walls and fences – thank God, we have plenty of those – as well as thousands of hand-made posters. But poetry managed to stay abreast of the revolution, if not be about it. Poets gave interviews, wrote open letters and articles to various media, but not poetry. The only ‘orange’ poem I have read so far was written in New York. I call it a victory. And a liberation of poet from the role of “national Messiah”, mentioned by {id="5528" title="Yuri Andrukhovych"} in the introduction to November issue of Ukrainian poetry.
Thus the March issue is not about oranges; it’s about poetry, as usual. For the first time it presents the work of two poets, not just one.
{id="5520" title="Halyna Krouk"} is 30, and about to publish her third book of poetry. She’s one of the younger but quite well-known Ukrainian poets loved by critics. She writes out of a “boundary condition” and her poetry is that of “a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown”, as Pedro Almodovar puts it.
{id="5517" title="Mykola Ryabchuk"}, a real guru for the subsequent generations of poets, wrote his last poem in 1988. Today he’s much better known as a political analyst and essayist, which leaves his brilliant poetry – under the Soviet regime he was expelled from the university for such writings – in unworthy obscurity.
Belonging to different generations they have a common sense of the word – they are very thrifty, sometimes even taciturn, but sharp and precise. There’s nowhere to hide – one can feel a strong author’s self behind each line.
This issue introduces a new feature – an {id="5517" title="interview with a poet"} (in this case Ryabchuk), conducted especially for PIW, and continues to publish translators’ notes on the poetry they worked on.
See you in May!
© Kateryna Botanova
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